by Jonathan Eig
Despite his earlier exposure, nothing had yet moved Clay to consider joining the Nation of Islam. Boxing, not race or religion, was foremost on his mind. Cash Clay had hired a black lawyer to review his son’s first professional contract, and the elder Clay had also pushed his son to choose a black trainer in Fred Stoner. But those choices proved inconsequential. Cassius Clay the boxer had been interested in the shortest path to fame and glory, not in philosophical or political gestures, which is why he trusted his career to the all-white Louisville Sponsoring Group and why he chose a white man for a trainer. In his dozens of interviews with reporters in 1960 and 1961, Clay never discussed or expressed solidarity with the Freedom Riders who were touring the South by bus and facing arrest and violent attack as they tested a recent Supreme Court ruling that had desegregated interstate transport. Neither did he voice support for students engaged in sit-ins at lunch counters or for Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who was assaulted by rock-throwing crowds of white men when he spoke at a church in Montgomery, Alabama. If Clay knew about these events, he either didn’t consider them important or didn’t know what to say about them. But as he found himself exposed repeatedly to the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad’s message began to shape his view of what it meant to be a black man in America in 1961. As Rudy Clay put it, “It gave him confidence in being black.”
The front page of the issue of Muhammad Speaks that Clay held in his hand that December day included an article written by Elijah Muhammad, whose byline identified him as “MESSENGER OF ALLAH.” The article began, “My followers and I are being accused of being un-American. We actually do not know what is American and what is un-American, as the United States of America has not instructed us as to what constitutes an American or an un-American.” Muhammad’s column referred to a subcommittee report from the California State Senate that labeled “Negro Muslims” unpatriotic and accused the Nation of Islam of using its schools to teach racial hatred. “This is untrue,” Muhammad wrote, “for we only teach them who YOU really are. They can hate or love you, it is up to them.” He went on to write that white people were clearly using their schools to instruct white children in the hatred of black people, and that white people were “the number one murderers of Negroes.”
Many of the articles in the second edition of Muhammad Speaks reinforced the central philosophy of the Nation of Islam: a “war of Armageddon” was approaching. Allah had permitted America and other Christian nations to enslave Africans — “chewing on men’s bones for three hundred years,” as Elijah Muhammad put it. The suffering had been a test, Muhammad said, and those black men and women who were ready to take responsibility and embrace Islam would be rewarded when the white man was vanquished and the black man ruled the earth. Muhammad scolded his black followers: “You are the man that is asleep,” he wrote in another issue of the newspaper. “The white man is wide awake. He is not a dummy by any means. He has built a world. His knowledge and wisdom is now reaching out through space.”
Clay was not a pensive person. He had not led a life of poverty and suffering. Nor had he been exposed through books or teachers to the world of ideas. But Elijah Muhammad’s call for discipline and self-improvement struck a chord for a young man who drank garlic water, ran alongside buses to school, and avoided alcohol-fueled late nights with friends. And Muhammad’s proclamation that the so-called Negroes were God’s chosen people surely resonated with someone who already called himself “The Greatest.” The cartoon resonated, too; it was easy to understand why Africans forcibly transported across the ocean might be suspicious of the religion thrust upon them by the men who had enslaved them and labeled them subhuman. Finally, though he had not been the victim of any violent racial attacks, Clay understood that the white man had the authority to inflict all manner of suffering on him. He’d heard his father say it countless times. The white man had the power, and as long as that remained the case, every black person would live in fear. Survival was the black man’s goal — not enlightenment, not enrichment. Survival was the best he could hope for, because around every corner and in every contact with white society, the black man faced the possibility of financial ruin, imprisonment, and death.
That vulnerability strengthened some black men and women; it reminded them they were engaged in an eternal struggle. Now, as he grew more comfortable and confident in his role as a public figure, Clay may have been trying to take a stand in solidarity with suffering black Americans, taking on the burden of his father. If power is the currency of human existence, Cassius Clay was flexing his muscles in the broadest possible sense, exploring his capacity to influence others and shape the world around him.
Elijah Muhammad’s philosophy offered a black man the possibility of dignity and power. It offered him a sense of self. And the white man’s approval was not required. “The mind is its own place,” says Lucifer in Milton’s Paradise Lost, “and in itself can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.” The black man didn’t have to remain in hell just because the white man relegated him to it, Muhammad said. He had the power to forge his own identity, to transform the conditions imposed upon him, and he needed no one’s permission, no Supreme Court order. He could do it through the power of his own thoughts, through his own might, his own actions. Cassius Clay wasn’t terribly interested in religion, but Elijah Muhammad’s message was not strictly religious. Islam was a “facade,” said Bennett Johnson, who worked for the Nation of Islam and met Clay in the early 1960s, “a structure.” It was a story that gave Elijah Muhammad a way to teach black Americans how they might liberate themselves.
It resonated with Clay, Johnson said, because Clay was a fighter above all else.
Clay was splitting his time between Louisville and Miami as 1961 turned to 1962. In Miami one day, at the corner of Second Avenue and Sixth Street, he saw a black man in a seersucker suit selling copies of Muhammad Speaks. This time, before the newspaper salesman could make his pitch, Clay shouted across the street: “Why are we called Negroes? Why are we deaf, dumb, and blind?” Clay was quoting the lyrics from the Louis X song, “The White Man’s Heaven Is the Black Man’s Hell.”
The newspaper salesman was a boxing fan and recognized Clay. He introduced himself as Captain Sam, though his real name was Sam Saxon and he would later change it to Abdul Rahman. Saxon was a high-school dropout, drug user, and everyday gambler — “the third best pool shooter in Atlanta,” he said — before the Nation of Islam straightened him out. When he wasn’t peddling copies of Muhammad Speaks, Saxon worked at Miami’s racetracks — Hialeah, Gulfstream, and Tropical Park — where he spent his shifts in the men’s rooms, handing out towels, shining shoes, and hoping for tips from the white clientele.
Clay was eager to show Saxon his scrapbook, so the men got into Captain Sam’s old Ford and drove to the fighter’s hotel. Along the way, Clay went into his usual routine, describing how he intended to fight Ingemar Johansson first and then Floyd Patterson to become the youngest heavyweight champion in the history of boxing. Saxon loved the young man’s energy and confidence: “I thought, ‘Yeah, that man is gonna be champ. He believe!’ ”
A friendship sprung quickly, and Saxon decided that he would bring Clay into the Nation of Islam. “He knew about it, but he wasn’t in yet,” Saxon said. They talked about Elijah Muhammad’s message, about slave names, and about the meaning of the word Negro, which had been the term many black men and women had preferred through most of the twentieth century, a term used with pride to refer to men who had flown fighter planes in World War II, started businesses, integrated baseball leagues, and founded universities, but also a term that seemed to be losing its power in the early part of the 1960, running its course, a word that felt inadequate to men like Captain Sam who were striving to define themselves on their own conditions.
“I pulled him in to what we call a registered Muslim,” Saxon said, recalling that the conversion involved no twisting of arms or subtle psychological ploys. “It ain’t hard for a black man to come out of the Christian religion when th
ere’s nothing there for black folks. The white Christian people had enslaved us and given us their names and he saw all that. It ain’t hard for any black man to be convinced. Most people who don’t come over have fear in their hearts. He was fearless. I was fearless . . . Wasn’t nothing slow about him believing. He started coming to the meetings and participating like everybody else, thinking the right way, eating the right way.”
In Louisville, Clay hadn’t been ready to attend a Nation of Islam meeting, but now, perhaps because of the independence offered with a little distance from his hometown and his parents, he visited Temple No. 29, a vacant storefront converted into a mosque — and he was hooked by what he heard.
“This minister started teaching, and the things he said really shook me up,” he told the writer Alex Haley years later. “Things like that we twenty million black people in America didn’t know our true identities, or even our true family names. And we were the direct descendants of black men and women stolen from a rich black continent and brought here and stripped of all knowledge of themselves and taught to hate themselves and their kind. And that’s how us so-called ‘Negroes’ had come to be the only race among mankind that loved its enemies. Now, I’m the kind that catches on quick. I said to myself, listen here, this man’s saying something!”
As his twentieth birthday approached, Clay was preparing for his first pro fight in Madison Square Garden, the nation’s high temple of boxing. His opponent, Sonny Banks, wasn’t much of a fighter, owner of a record of ten wins and two losses against a string of mediocre opponents. But Clay nonetheless saw this as a big moment, not only because he would be fighting in the Garden but because he would get the chance to promote himself in New York City, the nation’s media capital. On his first trip to New York since his return from the Olympics, Clay was at his brashest and most ebullient. Reporters ate it up. The journalists didn’t know, of course, that there was one thing about which Clay never spoke: his recent immersion into the Nation of Islam.
On February 6, 1962, Clay was the featured speaker at a luncheon for the Metropolitan Boxing Writers’ Association. “Boxing is not as colorful as it was in the past,” he said. “We need more guys to liven it up and I think I can help.” He predicted that he would knock out Sonny Banks in the fourth round.
A cold wind whipped Manhattan on fight night, and many fans decided to stay home to watch on TV. Paying customers at Madison Square Garden booed when Clay was introduced, although these were not the lusty, full-throated, out-for-blood screams that greeted Gorgeous George. Spectators who came to see if Banks would shut Clay’s ever-running trap enjoyed a moment of excitement in the first round as Banks sprung from a crouch and hit Clay with a short left hook. Clay fell, landing on his bottom. He practically bounced back up, spending less than a second on the mat. Still, it was the first time he’d been knocked down as a pro. Banks threw more left hooks as the round continued, hoping he’d discovered Clay’s weakness, but Clay caught on quickly and resisted. Sam Langford — one of boxing’s wise men and mighty punchers — once proffered this advice to fellow fighters: “Whatever the other man want to do, don’t let him.” Clay punched back and scooted away, and Banks never hurt him again. By the second round, Clay was calmly in control, the moment spent on his backside seemingly forgotten, and by the third he was using Banks as his punching bag. Banks flopped and staggered until the referee stopped the fight in the opening seconds of the fourth round. When it was over, Banks’s corner man, Harry Wiley, explained, “Things just went sour gradually all at once.”
It was no clash of titans. Clay, after all, was ranked only ninth among heavyweight contenders, and Banks was unranked. But by surviving a knockdown and bouncing back to knock his opponent stupid, Clay had at least earned points with the reporters who considered him “of feeble constitution,” as A. J. Liebling put it. A few boxing writers made what might have seemed an obvious observation — that for all the talk of Clay’s incredible speed and reflexes, he was, in fact, bigger and stronger than most of his opponents.
Clay kept winning throughout 1962, mostly against solid but unspectacular fighters such as George Logan and Don Warner, men who were in it for the payday, mostly, not to fulfill promises of glory; men who were happy to fight a loudmouth because the loudmouth’s growing celebrity meant bigger than usual crowds. The only fighter who gave Clay trouble was a twenty-four-year-old New Yorker named Billy “The Barber” Daniels, who bobbed and jabbed and forced Clay to backpedal. Daniels, who came into the fight with a 16–0 record, landed big, heavy punches. He seemed to be in control until he suffered two cuts to the left eye, prompting the referee to stop the action in the seventh round out of concern for the damaged fighter’s health. The referee awarded Clay the technical knockout.
Finally, in July, Clay stepped into the ring against a top-ten fighter, the Argentinian Alejandro Lavorante, who had knocked out Zora Folley a year earlier. In front of twelve thousand fans at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Clay came out jabbing against his bigger, stronger opponent, and needed only about two minutes to open a cut under Lavorante’s left eye. In the second round, Clay threw so many punches Lavorante scarcely had time to hit back. One of Clay’s punches — a straight right hand — landed flush on the Argentinian’s jaw and wobbled the big man’s legs. In the fifth, another right hand flattened the left side of Lavorante’s face. Lavorante fell hard. When the wounded boxer staggered to his feet, Clay threw a furious left hook and knocked him back down. Lavorante fell so suddenly his head bounced off the top rope and came to rest on the bottom strand, as if it were his pillow. The referee, concerned for the fallen boxer’s condition, didn’t even count Lavorante out. He waved his hands in the air, declaring the match over and signaling for a trainer or doctor to tend to the injured man at once. (Two months later, Lavorante fought again, got knocked out again, and slipped into a coma from which he never woke.)
Four months after beating Lavorante, on November 15, 1962, Clay faced Archie Moore, the man who had briefly served as his trainer. Moore was a month shy of his forty-sixth birthday (or his forty-ninth, by some accounts), a boxing ancient, with a mind-boggling professional record of 185 wins, 22 losses, and 10 draws, a record running all the way back to 1935, when Babe Ruth played baseball and Franklin Delano Roosevelt pitched his Social Security Act. Moore also owned the all-time record for wins by knockout with 132.
“I view this man with mixed emotions,” Moore said of Clay. “He’s like a man that can write beautifully but doesn’t know how to punctuate. He has this twentieth century exuberance, but there’s a bitterness in him somewhere . . . He is certainly coming along at a time when a new face is needed on the boxing scene, on the fistic horizon. But in his anxiousness to be this person, he may be over-playing his hand by belittling people. He wants to show off regardless of whose feet he’s stepping on.”
Moore said he would hit Clay with a new punch called “the lip-buttoner,” a reference to the nickname recently bestowed on Clay by the press: “The Louisville Lip.”
Clay answered with the easy rhyme: “Moore must fall in four.”
Clay enjoyed himself as he looked forward to the biggest payday and the biggest audience of his career. Hardly an interview went by in which he failed to describe the luxurious manner in which he would soon be living — dressed in $55 alligator shoes, with $500 cash in his pocket, a “fox” on each arm, driving a brand-new red Fleetwood Cadillac with a built-in telephone, and living in a $175,000 house. Clay spoke of these things romantically, the way a painter talks of capturing the perfect light at sunset. Asked once if he fought for money or glory, he replied without hesitation: “The money comes with the glory.” The more audaciously he spoke, the more unpopular he grew. One day, while training at the Main Street Gym in Los Angeles, Clay was booed so lustily that police were summoned to prevent a riot. Jim Murray, the Los Angeles Times columnist, complained that “Cassius’ love affair with himself is so classic in proportion if Shakespeare were alive he would write a play about it. It is one o
f history’s great passions and the love of Cassius for Clay is so rapturous no girl could come between them. Marriage would almost be bigamy.”
Before the fight, Angelo Dundee told reporters that Moore was too old to backpedal, that he would only move forward. Clay’s jabs would stop Moore from getting in close, the trainer predicted, and then Moore would be helpless, all but immobilized. Dundee had it right. Moore crouched. Clay circled and jabbed. Moore resembled a turtle, ducking for cover, looking around for his attacker before ducking again. Within minutes, the older fighter’s face was swollen. By the middle of the third round, Moore looked like a man desperate to be somewhere, anywhere else, at one point cringing in anticipation of a blow. Finally, in the fourth round, Clay knocked him down. Moore got up, then fell again, then got up one more time and fell for the last time.
“I’ll take Sonny Liston right now,” Clay said after the fight, “and I’ll finish him in eight rounds.”
This was the same Sonny Liston who had just humiliated the heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson, knocking him out in only 126 seconds; the same Sonny Liston who had beaten Wayne Bethea so badly that after the fight his corner men had removed seven teeth from the losing fighter’s mouthpiece and spotted blood dripping from his ear.
That night, as it happened, Clay ran into Liston in a downtown Los Angeles ballroom.
“You’re next!” Clay said.
The champion did not appear concerned.
10
“It’s Show Business”
Cassius Clay was a contender now, ranked fourth in the world among heavyweights, his fame spreading fast, his path to the championship clear. All he had to do was keep talking and keep winning.
He celebrated his twenty-first birthday with a luncheon at the Sherwyn Hotel in Pittsburgh, along with his mother, father, brother, and dozens of local news reporters from print, radio, and television. He was in Pittsburgh to prepare for his next bout, against Charlie Powell, a giant of a man who not only boxed but had also played defensive end for the Oakland Raiders and San Francisco Forty-Niners of the National Football League. Powell was bigger and more experienced than Clay, but Clay, of course, expressed his usual outsized confidence to the lunch crowd. After his defeat of Archie Moore, Clay had initially said he would not fight again until either Floyd Patterson or Sonny Liston agreed to face him. What would he prove by “knocking out some bums,” he had asked. But he had changed his mind and agreed to fight Powell, he said, because it sounded like easy money, and he wanted to keep sharp while waiting for his shot at the championship. He prophesied an early knockout.